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| WE'RE SWINGING IN THE RAIN |
“There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “only not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer to them. But it seems to me, in our rapidly darkening world, that the converse of Kafka’s quip is equally true: There is no hope, except for us.
I’m talking, of course, about climate change. The struggle to rein in global carbon emissions and keep the planet from melting down has the feel of Kafka’s fiction...
Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable... you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth—massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you’re under thirty, you’re all but guaranteed to witness it."
THE GUARDIAN
Jonathan Franzen's made up climate change model sparks online pile-on
‘As a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling,’
claimed the author in The New Yorker, sparking a flurry of mockery online
Alison Flood Mon 9 Sep 2019
It’s been almost a year since a Jonathan Franzen pile-on, so we were undoubtedly due another. This time round, the novelist – Mr “Oprah’s book club choices are ‘schmaltzy’”, Mr “I considered adopting an Iraqi war orphan”, Mr “I write in the dark with a blindfold on”, Mr “It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction” – is under fire for declaring the fight against the climate crisis to be hopeless.
Citing the “consensus among scientists and policy-makers” that we will pass the “point of no return” for the planet “if the global mean temperature rises by more than two degrees”, Franzen writes in the New Yorker of how “as a non-scientist, I do my own kind of modelling”. He has, he says, “run various future scenarios through my brain” and “count[ed] the scenarios in which collective action averts catastrophe”.
Spoiler: the Franzen Brain Model doesn’t point to a joyful future for humanity.
“Call me a pessimist or call me a humanist, but I don’t see human nature fundamentally changing anytime soon. I can run ten thousand scenarios through my model, and in not one of them do I see the two-degree target being met,” he writes.
Many climate scientists, however, feel that despite the number of scenarios it has run – 10,000! – the Franzen Brain Model could do with a bit of tinkering. “Franzen’s modeling isn’t scientific modeling at all. It’s DAYDREAMING,” wrote volcanologist Jess Phoenix on Twitter.
“Dear @NewYorker,” added water conservation specialist and MacArthur fellow Peter Gleick. “The fact that pretty much every single person who actually understands & writes about #climatechange for a living is dunking hard on the new piece by Franzen is an indication that you shouldn’t just publish a piece because it’s written by Franzen.”
